Labels, Generations, History and I'm Blogging Again.

Over the weekend I had an exchange on Twitter with a woman who dislikes a certain kind of humor and pointed her finger at the “Boomers” saying that they like that kind of humor. I took exception to this. I was born in the Baby Boom but I was born three years before the end and I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea of being lumped in with people born nearly twenty years before me rather than three years after me. She argued that generalization is a perfectly acceptable way of getting ideas across in conversation and I let the matter drop and told her that although I disagreed, I respected her opinion. That wasn’t lip service. I do respect her and her opinion. However, I find that I haven’t been able to let the topic go.

It’s been a long time since I did any blogging here and I long ago deleted all of my previous posts because I wanted a fresh start when I eventually gave it another try. I’m not sure if this is what I was thinking about when I decided to start up this blog again. Mostly what I want to talk about here is magic and the occult. this is more of an observational thing. Nonetheless, I think the point will be useful to magic types of people of all sorts so here we go.

I object to labeling people based on the range of years in which they were born. Astrology notwithstanding, it seems to me that the only reason people started labeling a particular generation this or that is a statistical thing. Those people who try to manage large populations need to keep track of how many people there are and approximately what ages they are. After all, if 10,000,000 people, more or less than usual, are born in a given period of time, arrangements need to be made for there to be more or less food production, less or more schools in operation or less/more jobs available. Surely it’s obvious that these sorts of arrangements won’t happen overnight and will require planning. For what it’s worth, all of us use abbreviations of sorts. It is simply easier to say “Baby Boomers” than “the X number of people born between 19XX and 19XX.”

How much do people born in the same generation have in common? That’s a tough one. All human beings have a great deal in common and are also very different from each other. Similarities are fruit for a longer conversation than I’m going to start now, although, if anyone wants to take it up in the comment section, that would be great. Differences are easy to see. The United States has always struggled with regional differences. A Baby Boomer born in rural Alabama was going to have a very different cultural basis and reference than one born in New York City or Los Angeles. Regional differences aside, the time span of the Baby Boom spans what I would call, vastly different worlds in which people grew and learned. So, the Baby Boom “officially” took place between 1946 and 1964.

1946

I was born in 1962.

1962

The person born in 1946 turned 21 years old in 1967, the Summer of Love.

I turned 21 years old in 1983.

As I said, different worlds. Hopefully the pictures show that the “nurture” of people at different ends of the Baby Boom was very different. The "nature" on the other hand is “human nature” and no more the responsibility of “Boomers” than anyone else.

The type of humor that the person I was talking with didn’t like was anti wife humor. The example that leaps into my mind is “If I’d have killed her when I first wanted to, I’d be out of prison by now.” Which I heard from my father who was too old to be a “Boomer”.

It occurred to me that I think I’ve seen jokes that were hostile to wives in Enlightenment, Renaissance and Medieval texts. I had to do some research but I found ancient Roman and Greek anti wife jokes. Here’s an example from ancient Greece: “A wife-hater is attending the burial of his wife, who has just died. When someone asks ‘Who is it that rests in peace here?’ he answers ‘Me, now that I am rid of her!”

I don’t think wife jokes are the provenance of “Boomers”. I think they are human. I’m tempted to say “male” but, I’ve seen an awful lot of sit coms and an ancient Greek comedy that are hostile to husbands. I think they are probably just an outgrowth of relationships. I’ve been married for over thirty years. Relationships are really hard work. There will be times when there is anger, and, laughing at it is probably better than bemoaning it. In Fact, Tarot Key 15 The Devil, has humor as one of its layers of meaning. Just look at The Devil in Rider/Waite/Smith deck.

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There is no creature like that walking around on Earth. It is too ridiculous looking to be worthy of literal belief. Laughing at that ridiculousness disperses it, or at least lessons its impact. That said, I don’t think that the lady that I was talking to is wrong for not liking those jokes. She likes what she likes and doesn’t like what she doesn’t like. Also, I can see an argument that humor of that sort might help to condition male minds into thinking that violence against women is acceptable and, that’s about as bad a thing as there could be.

I suppose then that a finger could be pointed at the “Boomers” for not attempting to do away with that sort of humor to the benefit of women, assuming that doing so would indeed benefit women. Well, all I can say to that is that many “Boomers’ fought a lot of battles to make the world a better place and succeeded in some of those battles and failed in others.

I don’t want to spend time here going over the credentials of the various movements of the 1960’s but I would like to make an exhortation towards knowing some history. I love a movie called The Big Chill which is about the transition of “Boomers”, who are older than me, from college kids to adults. In fact, into “Yuppies”. A line from it that sticks with me is “No one had a cushier birth than we did. It's not surprising our friendship could survive that.” White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American “Boomers” had it better in regards to wealth, education, luxury etc than any other generation in the history of the world. In some ways the education and entertainment that they had access to was comparable to Roman Emperors based just on having public libraries, transistor radios and television. Generations since have had it just as cushy or more so, and some of that luxury goes to people who aren’t white, Anglo-Saxon or protestant, although not enough. That very cushion is dangerous if we don’t know enough about generations that went before or what the world has been like to live in for the last ten millennia. From our cushion it is easy to see what is wrong with out world but without a knowledge of history it isn’t so easy to see how much better it is now than it has ever been before. It’s also easy to blame people for not having overcome all the social evils of the world long before we were born, but a little knowledge of history will show that there has always been a fight against those social evils.

I also would love to talk a bit here about some good uses for generalization but that ends up leading me into Neo-Platonism, Platonism and Qabalah and their attempts to open our minds to the abstract but, that’s probably best left for another post.

In any event, my biggest point is, often labels, like “Boomers” do more to hide reality than explain it.